A Crumbling Hive of Humanity Fit for Dickens

Los Angeles’ main house of justice is a Rube Goldberg apparatus, a vast, shuddering contraption where lofty ideals gnash against harsh realities like broken-tooth gears.

It juts from the flanks of Bunker Hill with the spartan lines of an electrical transformer. Constructed 40 years ago out of marble, bronze and fluorescent tubes, the L.A. County Courthouse has been left to slip into disrepair pretty much ever since. The building has rats, asbestos, broken acoustical tiles, bad pipes and chronically overflowing toilets that send water trickling down through light fixtures below.

The varnish is gone from the oak-paneled courtrooms and from everything else, leaving an ambience of crass functionality, a place bleak and institutional and packed nine stories high with quirks. Some of the third-floor ceilings leak; they’re beneath the hillside and a cracked outdoor walkway. The marble clock on the fifth floor has no hands. Underground tunnels branch off in mysterious directions. There are lawyers who have spent years trudging through that dank realm to pull old case files with no idea what lies down intersecting pathways--shadowy nether regions filled with industrial noises and jets of steam.

In contrast to courts devoted to criminal matters, this is the bench of the people, a detangling mechanism for everyday entrapments: apartment fires and fuel-tank explosions, car wrecks, broken contracts, paternity disputes, divorces and custody issues, landlord-tenant fights, probate battles. If you’re ever going to go to court in L.A. County, chances are it will be here, or a smaller version of it.

Nearly 2 million people a year push through the glass doors at 17 entrances on four different levels. Yet that only hints at the complexity of the place, for the building is more than a single civil courthouse; it is two of them, fused together like the halves of an engine block.

Step inside at 111 N. Hill St. and you are in the main building of the nation’s largest Superior Court system. But go up the hill and walk in on the fourth floor, at 110 N. Grand Ave., and you will find separate filing windows, separate clerks and a separate roster of judges. You are now in the flagship of the nation’s biggest Municipal Court.

Into these dual conduits flow tragedies and grudges at the staggering rate of about 13,000 new cases a month. The anxiety and pain seem to hang like a fog, filtering down luminous hallways, leaving black soot marks where it recirculates through the ceiling vents.

These windowless halls are the conveyor belts of strife, people moving against their will. You can feel the torque of lives bending, the tremor of things not right. There is something unfeeling in the way the light hits the white marble walls and poorly matched beige terrazzo floors. Hard surfaces here and hard edges, the inhospitable backdrop to hard times. No one smiles. No one would be here if they could be anywhere else.

Wood benches are scarred with graffiti, cigarette burns, the petrified rings from long-ago soft drink cans. Legal combatants stare from them like zombies, or grab a minute for tense dialogue with their lawyers.

Conversations tend toward a singular tone, the singsong dirge of lives in crisis: “If you decide to do it, you’ll have to make some sacrifices. . . . That’s what the code says; just follow the code. . . . Do whatever you can, OK? It’s all in your hands. . . . It’s not going to settle; you know it’s not going to settle. . . . The way she operates. . . . Anything we can get done in the hall, when the meter’s running, is smart, as opposed to. . . . Do you want me to get off the case?”

Winners emerge smiling, even jubilant. Some are granted multimillion-dollar judgments, others extract themselves from poisonous marriages, turning points that will alter their lives. But they hurriedly take their happiness and go, leaving the building to those still burdened by their troubles.

A Murder Within

Wall signs are in English and Spanish, but that fact is a poor barometer of the social diversity. Testimony has been rendered in more than 100 languages and dialects, from Afghani to Zambal. You can run into supermodels and window washers, stooped old men in plaid shirts and Armenian women pushing strollers.

This remains one of the only courthouses in Los Angeles with no metal detectors. Three years ago, a combatant in a divorce case named Harry Zelig horrified bystanders, including his own young daughter, by pulling out a handgun and murdering his wife near the second-floor escalator. Not many have forgotten it, least of all the judges who pass down life-altering rulings and the bailiffs responsible for maintaining order.

Two or three times a day someone, often a judge, presses a hidden button wired to an ancient panel of alarm lights in an upper-floor office. Bailiffs rush to break up a fight, defuse a threat or usher some angry litigant out to the street or to jail. Metal detectors are due to be installed this summer.

Of all the traumatic experiences in Los Angeles, few are more wrenching than arriving here for the first time to face legal warfare. Navigate the downtown traffic and you find yourself with lines to stand in, procedures to worry about. Your life is wobbling out of control, and you are forced to put your trust in mirthless strangers: a judge, sitting like God on high, and lawyers, some billing small fortunes every hour.

Gila Yashari, a Beverly Hills real estate agent, is crying outside the courtroom before a hearing in her divorce case. “I’ll tell you, it’s scary,” she says. “You have no idea what’s going on, and there’s no book about it. You wait in the halls for hours. . . . It’s like they dip you in hot water about 50 times a day, and you wake up in the morning and you know you’re going to get dipped again.”

Dungeon of Tension

Walk through any chambers of the Family Law courts, scattered on floors 2 through 6, and you enter a dungeon of tension, anger and frustration. Cases involving custody disputes have been known to drag on for 18 years--from the moment a child is born until legal adulthood.

Rich husbands steal away assets in the Cayman Islands. Wives take their children and diamonds and flee to France. A woman named Molly Yuen files for divorce from her rich husband, Henry, fully expecting a share of his millions. To her apparent shock, she discovers that Henry has already divorced her a dozen years earlier--without her knowledge, she says--well before building his financial empire.

Fascinating battles sing across the gossip wire, discussed and second-guessed in the third-floor judges’ lounge where bagel breakfasts are held Friday mornings, at the fast-food eateries where clerks grab lunch and in bars where lawyers drop their briefcases at sundown.

The tension comes out in laughter, jokes about it all, but there is always an underlying awareness that the theater is real. Good people get crushed. Children are kidnapped, manipulated for selfish ends. Neighbors butt heads in tiffs that will leave both sides bleeding.

Some of the most riveting struggles occur in Probate, where wills are reviewed, estates divided and unclaimed possessions sold at auction. Here, grief over the death of a loved one is sometimes overshadowed by angry jousting over who will inherit what. Desire for money, sports cars and wine collections pits brother against brother, sister against sister.

Slip into Department 5, Commissioner Ronald H. Hauptman’s courtroom, and you can stare into the life of Shirley Hollingsworth, a proud former USC history professor, now 77 and struggling fiercely to maintain her independence.

Her vitality has ebbed: arthritis, thyroid disease, a peptic ulcer, osteoporosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hypertension. Hollingsworth is now thin to the point of anorexia and moves about with a walker or a wheelchair. Her son John filed the petition to put her finances and personal care in the hands of a conservator, citing the massive disarray at her home in Pacific Palisades. Photographs show floors strewn with trash--plastic bags, pill bottles, pots, glassware, jars, rolls of toilet paper, rat feces.

A psychologist sent out to administer a battery of 15 tests--abstract reasoning, problem-solving and the like--found a woman of exceptional intelligence with signs of dementia. “She . . . is believed to drive with no license and no insurance,” the examiner reported, “and drives dangerously, according to neighbors. She eats one meal a day. Her home is run-down with no heat, a broken stove and electrical problems.”

Even weighing all that, the issues are delicate and reach deep into us all.

“You’re asking the court to make Solomonic decisions,” her lawyer, Gary Ruttenberg, tells a reporter outside court. “She is cognizant of everything around her. She says she’s capable of handling her own things and should be left alone to do what she wants to do.”

Each human drama is but a grain of sand on a mountainous beachhead of litigation. The sad chronicle of Shirley Hollingsworth’s later years is detailed in file No. BP 054 172, a color-coded folder that looks much like any other in Room 112, the Records room, a cavern of high metal shelves containing some 450,000 other files. Many, like Hollingsworth’s, are but a single thin volume. Others grow to massive dimensions. A case against Paradise Memorial Park, a cemetery where graves were dug up and plots resold, now fills 13 boxes, a load that can only be moved on dollies. That file is housed alongside other humongous cases in an adjoining room with a hand-printed sign over the door: “Odd Files.”

Mountains of Paper

The paperwork is the mainspring that drives the whole building. The files in 112, and in the Muni Court stacks three floors up, are in ceaseless motion: Dozens at a time are trundled on metal carts to trials and hearings. Clerks are forever moving old cases down to Archives, a onetime bomb cellar accessible through underground tunnels. Each motion, each judgment means still more paperwork to be sorted and moved.

Glitches are inevitable. Every lawyer has some horror story about papers--or whole cases--that disappeared. About 10 files a day go missing. There are ways to track them--bar codes and computer programs that key on transposed numbers--but a search can sometimes take days. Occasionally a trial must be postponed while harried clerks search the proverbial haystack. Frustrated lawyers are always on the phone: “Where’s the file? What’s going on?” Bearing the responsibility for victory or defeat in the courtroom, they often exhibit thinly veiled disdain for the ever-changing cast of clerks.

“They’re county employees,” complains one attorney, “so if there’s one person in line or 10 people in line, they’re going to move at the same speed.”

The clerks answer with sarcastic humor. A paper sign behind the information desk in Records advertises, “Answers: $1. Answers which require thought: $2.”

You can wait in line and find out the file is not in the stacks because it has just been returned--i.e., dumped down a short metal chute and hidden in a pile of other returns. Or your file may not be in Records at all. It may be in one of the courtrooms. Or it may be in Archives, the dim, cave-like repository of about 1 million older case records stored in folders and on microfilm.

So, for example, should you wish to explore the reasons that Sylvester Stallone sued a woman named Barbara Guggenheim the day after Christmas in 1989--a case that involved millions of dollars in artwork--Archives is your destination.

Getting there is a journey into Wonderland. First you hunt your rabbit hole, a rusted, free-standing elevator on a grassy mall across Hill Street. There is no building around it, just the elevator in a badly eroded kiosk. Or you can take the more adventurous route--the long, square tunnel that begins in the courthouse’s canted underground garage.

Dark, slanting passageways, braided with overhead pipes, branch off to Archives, the Criminal Courts Building, the Hall of Records and to one unnamed place, barricaded with chain-link. The tunnel takes you to an escalator that goes down one more level to a high-ceilinged bunker crowded with tables, a long counter and shelves that rise like skyscrapers. Buttressed between two of them, thin boards support a trash can to catch incoming rain.

This dour cellar, like other warrens, has its own strange constituency, an ebb and flow of stoic men in ball caps, women in baggy sweats, motivated by circumstance to track down old divorce papers, Social Security files or records of criminal proceedings. One young woman recently came in to scour files on train and streetcar accidents going back to 1880. A man from the Genealogical Society of Utah was after divorce files dating to the same period.

Back at street level, jurors stream into the courthouse at the rate of about 200 a day, compelled here from a 20-mile radius. Before being assigned out to various chambers, they crowd into a second-floor assembly room and drift next door to Elias’ Snack Shoppe, run by a nearly blind, rheumy-eyed Egyptian named Elias Thomas. Along with coffee, hot dogs and slices of pizza, Thomas hawks $5 tapes of himself playing Middle Eastern tunes on the lute. He squints to make change and dreams that someone will discover him here and make him a star.

Court employees and county messengers bag up mounds of mail and whisk it down the hall, and through the tunnels, on orange motorized carts. Out front is a shoeshine man, Peter Wiggins, who kicked a heroin habit and escaped a past that included prison time for armed robbery. Now, smiling and dapper in a tie and fedora, he brags of the lawyers and judges who give him $6 for a $4 shine.

In the filing rooms you will find a species of litigant known as the pro per, the hard-bitten individual who dares to handle his own lawsuits. These men and women, independent-minded and often dressed accordingly, are an exasperation to the judges, because almost invariably they bungle their cases and lose. The very worst--the most prolific--are eventually branded “vexatious litigants,” at which point they are forbidden to file further legal actions without the consent of the presiding judge.

This blackball list in Los Angeles County runs to more than 130 names. Some are notorious, among them a guy named Harold, a dogged but exceptionally unlucky man who was moved to launch a dozen ill-fated lawsuits over a span of years. One suit targeted a neighbor who was alleged to have committed a long list of transgressions: slashing Harold’s car tire, blowing cigarette smoke in his face, pounding on his door, subjecting him to long, threatening stares, and making an enormous number of hostile phone calls.

“[He] has already punched me unconscious with permanent brain damage, continues to intimidate and harass me, and may attack again,” Harold charged in his hand-written appeal for a restraining order.

There are times, when the dockets overflow at other courts, that criminal trials are transferred here from the Criminal Courts Building on Temple Street, even though the building is poorly equipped to handle dangerous inmates. Two dim lockups occupy the seventh floor, but there are no secure avenues for moving suspects to various courtrooms, so violent gang members and third-strikers are transported up and down a freight elevator and marched through public halls in handcuffs, only a few feet from passing women and children.

If nothing else, the building is solid--a concrete monstrosity that was viewed as something of a Taj Mahal when it opened in 1959. Its cost was $24 million, well over budget, making it, at the time, the nation’s most expensive trial court. There were touches of splendor then: All 101 courtrooms were paneled in eastern white oak. Entry doors were framed in bronze.

Backdrop of Decay

The four designers, including Paul R. Williams, the city’s first prominent black architect, were looking more for understated elegance than outright pizazz. They eschewed the intricate facades of earlier, now-razed courthouses and opted for a look that was later described by one architectural critic as “ ‘50s modern attempting to be classical and public.”

Today’s critics more often call it bland. Inside, the finery has become less and less salient against the intruding backdrop of decay. A broad section of marble has come down in the eighth-floor hallway. A room on the third floor contains hundreds of acoustical ceiling tiles, rubble from the Northridge earthquake. Doors are broken, ditto for courtroom chairs.

Janitors who prowl the dark hours complain about rats, roaches, fleas and water beetles. The building has more than 215 restrooms, but not one has a floor drain, a design oversight that has brought decades of exasperation. When toilet valves stick, or some vandalizing litigant jams paper towels or cafeteria fruit down the commode, the water spills out with nowhere to go. Problems that begin after hours often turn into floods before they are noticed, with the water dripping down into copy machines and computers on the next floor.

Pipes burst so often that some custodians think every last one should be yanked out and replaced. Floods of mysterious origin seep under the north wall of the evidence room, a gray hovel, enclosed in chain-link, where thousands of documents, maps and other exhibits are stored, including a dummy head used to argue some long-ago police brutality case that no one remembers.

In spite of its abundant flaws, the courthouse has been the scene of countless historic cases, some of which have shaped the evolution of civil law. Famous litigants began with Charlie Chaplin and Errol Flynn and continue even now with the likes of Kim Basinger, Pamela Anderson, Bette Midler and Carroll O’Connor.

In the old days, cases were doled out from huge master calendars. On Mondays, hundreds of attorneys would gather in a few massive courtrooms to hear where their trials would begin. Hucksters sold tip sheets about judges and prospective jurors. Lawyers billed their clients untold thousands of hours for time spent sitting around waiting.

That problem was solved with beepers. Lawyers were paged when trial was about to start. Now cases are assigned to judges the moment they are filed, a system that has eliminated years of backlog but not the anxiety. Attorneys still fret over the assignment of judges. The notion that they are all interchangeable parts--rational, objective arbiters of truth--is seen as naive foolishness. The fact is, a judge’s personality strongly influences the machinations of justice.

Victor E. Chavez, the presiding judge of the Superior Court, rode down the aisle at his wedding on horseback. Judge Alan Buckner lives on a yacht. Lawrence Crispo sings opera. Some are diplomats; others are reputed to be tough as rawhide.

Ronald Sohegian is one of the latter, a judge who inspires fear in more than a few lawyers. “If you deserve a head-cracking,” one attorney says, “he’ll crack your head.”

Judge Robert O’Brien, up on the eighth floor, handles injunctions and temporary restraining orders. Known as a stickler for punctuality who frequently arrives at the building before dawn, O’Brien likes to see motions filed no later than 8:45 a.m. If you have to pull a case in Records, or track down a file elsewhere, you may risk a day’s delay, a failure that might be critical in a TRO case that requires freezing assets or blocking a business deal.

Lawyers are loath to criticize the bench, fearful of paying the price in some future ruling, but privately they admit to having favorites--and others that sour their stomachs.

“Sometimes you just feel like a guy doesn’t like you,” one attorney says. “Something about your tie, about your hair.”

Few victories come easy here in this grand old hall of jurisprudence, but for dedicated attorneys there is the chance to leave a mark, one way or another. Some do it through insightful briefs or brilliant oratory. Down in Department 2, the lawyers of the master-calendar era did it another way.

In those days, when attorneys were allowed to sit in the jury box as they waited for their assignments, lawyers in the last row would tilt back against the white-oak paneling.

You can still see the line of amoeba-shaped oil spots, the stains of old Vitalis.